Best time to do Chalice dungeons?

[Gatatog]

I've beaten Rom and am currently working my way through the incredibly intimidating Yahar'gul but I've been wondering for a while what the best time to have a go at Chalice dungeons is: should I leave it until after my first playthrough or is it better to have a go before I finish my first run? I imagine that things carry over between the two, right, so would any echoes I get in Chalice runs help me level up for the main game?

 

To be completely honest I don't really know how Chalice dungeons work beyond requiring a ritual involving a Chalice to open, so any advice from people more in the know about the whole thing would be very much appreciated.

 

Ta

[Saltyie]

I didn't need to do Chalice Dungeons to get to the end, but I recommend working on a few of them before the final boss. Use the Lecture Theatre xp grinding method to farm 15k echos every few minutes if you need to level up.

 

They don't scale with NG+, so the difficulty doesn't increase, but you may as well do them all before completing the game. 

[Happy]

Here's how they work:

You must first complete a ritual, which means you need to have the chalice, materials and echoes to open a specific dungeon. Early chalices and materials are found ingame by beating some bosses, while later ones are found through the chalice dungeons themselves.

Each dungeon consists of 3-4 layers, which are each generated randomly. At the beginning of each layer you'll find a door that's licked by a mechanism. Your task is to find a lever that opens the door somewhere on that layer. Once you open that door you should find a boss enemy somewhere behind it. Repeat this until you beat the dungeon.

The last boss usually drops the chalice for the next dungeon and another one before him drops the chalice for the root version of the dungeon you're in. Feel free to ignore the root dungeons, they give you some good materials but nothing platinum related unless you need it to open the next dungeon.

EDIT: Oh yeah, your original question. The first two dungeons are pretty easy in comparison, but i'd recommend waiting until you upgrade your main weapon to +10 before trying the lower dungeon.

Edited April 3, 2015 by HappyKastanie

[Gatatog]

Thanks to you both for the advice and for explaining how they work.

 

I tried a couple of layers of my first dungeon and I'm just wondering what exactly the point of them is? I mean the loot seemed only useful for opening up more dungeons and the echoes I got from two full layers (bosses included) summed up to an amount that I'd barely even blink at if I lost them in the main game.

 

Obviously it's my first dungeon, and even then I only did a couple of layers, so I shouldn't be surprised to get nothing good from it so far, but I'm just wondering if the rewards become more worthwhile later on?

 

Thanks again.

 

Oh and btw, it's not that I need extra levelling or farming echoes or anything, I was just thinking that running Chalice dungeons might help it along. Then again, if that was the case, it'd probably be possible to become a little too powerful too early.

Edited April 4, 2015 by Gatatog

[NarcissusBaz]

I tried a couple of layers of my first dungeon and I'm just wondering what exactly the point of them is?

I believe best gems and runes drop from dungeons. But you have to be on depth 4-5 to find them. I personally think some dungeons are harder than anything else in the game, so there's that if you want some hardcore fun (try running Defiled dungeon where you only have 50% hp and bosses kill you in half a second).

Too bad you can't easily enter dungeons with your friends and get fine loot together. It's like FS decided "we want our dungeon co-op to be so hipstery and non-MMO, we'll make the whole thing as cryptic and stupid as possible". I know it's not WoW... but "dungeons" for crying out loud? You want to create a party and run that s**t together, especially when it's so challenging. Not - searching somebody's dungeon's code, getting inside, ringing a bell, waiting, rewriting captchas (ok I'm making this up now, but it's that level of insanity) and getting almost nothing in the end. Blah...

Edited April 4, 2015 by NarcissusBaz

[AkariKamigishi]

From depth 3+ you'll see better gems than anything you found in story mode - by the end, I was using gems with +21% attack, for example. Also, the later chalice dungeons give INSANE amounts of souls. For example, a single weak zombie can give you 4-5000 souls! Once your weapon is decent and you make some serious progress, you will see your levels explode.

 

As far as timing, it doesn't even matter. I did a couple early ones, and then ran all the rest in NG+. You'll need to be either at the end of story mode or in NG+ before you can handle depth 3 dungeons anyway.